Steam Version Of Battlefield Bad Company 2 Getting A Nice Patch

Along with a couple of bug fixes the newest patch for the Steam version of Battlefield Bad Company 2, the SecuROM will also get removed. EA has some history with the SecuROM, but that history has never gone over well with EA's consumers. Most of you will probably remember the Spore fiasco of only allowing a limited amount of installs before the disc would become completely useless. You can thank SecuROM for that.

Although it seems some light has been shined into EA's heart recently, Dragon Age didn't launch with SecuROM, Mass Effect has had it removed, and now Bad Company 2 is going to get it removed aswell.
Although this is only no the Steam version of the game, due the fact that Steam has its own authentication solutions in place, its still a big plus for anyone who's into PC gaming.
I'm glad to see that Steam is trustworthy enough, even for big publishers like EA, so that we might avoid more of these crazy DRM strategies (looking at you Ubisoft).

Battlefield Bad Company 2's Take On Grenade Spam

You might recall a couple weeks before Modern Warfare 2 launched last year, Infinity Ward put out a video to promote their game. The video featured Philadelphia's MLB pitcher, Cole Hammel, giving a quick talk on grenade spam, and how it ruins games. The video was supposed to be on the humorous side, but it caught some negative attention for the last couple seconds of the video. "Brought to you by Fighting Against Grenade Spam" was the famous line that caused all the commotion. If you don't notice the acronym for that line turns out to be F.A.G.S. which didn't go over too nicely with most of the public. Here's the video in-case you missed it during its release.


But that's old news. The real story comes from EA's new first person shooter, Battlefield Bad Company 2. Bad Company 2 has a tendency to subtlety make fun of Modern Warfare 2 throughout its campaign, but their new promotional video isn't too subtle anymore.

I find the video pretty funny in both parody, and its actual contents. Although this does beg the question. When is directly making fun of your game's competition too much? Do you think this video crossed the line?

No Modding Tools In Battlefield: Bad Company 2

Not all of today's news can be positive, and so, here's some negative news. It seems that Battlefield: Bad Company 2 will not include modding tools when it launches early next month. Throughout Bad Company 2's marketing campaign, they have been trying to set themselves apart from Modern Warefare 2 by allowing more player customization on a more technical level. One of the many things that is missing from Modern Warefare 2 is the ability for players to create their own maps. This is something that DICE, Battlefield developer, have always been big supporters of.
However, with Battlefield: Bad Company 2 it seems that releasing the modding tools isn't going to fit in the scheduled time line. Patrick Bach, senior producer on Battlefield Bad Company 2, said that they'd rather focus on making a fantastic game rather than "a buggy game with average gameplay but with modding possibilities."

He did also explain that there will still be a decent amount of user control with the option of changing dedicated servers, “The player can change settings on the dedicated server but there won’t be modding tools included in the retail game".
Even though out of the box modding tools would have been nice, its also good to see that DICE wants to focus mainly on making a kick-ass game versus just trying to 1-up Modern Warefare 2 with player modding tools. I also wouldn't be surprised to see modding tools become available after the game launches, as we have seen with several other games this year.